Ask Lemmy

Home stereo systems. As a kid I remained enthralled by the metal face and the heavily tactile buttons and switches and knobs. You felt a delicious variety of feedbacks for every action you took. I honestly think we really lost something special when tactility left technology. It was so satisfying to just use.

The internet

I was thinking the other day how much cooler flap displays at stations and airports were compared to modern displays.

Such a nice interface between computer control and a purely mechanical display. Watching them update, flipping through all the variables to land on the right one, and then clearing was so cool.

I miss the noise they made too. Haven’t seen one for like 20 years now.

Ooh, rotary phone switches. This YouTube channel (THIS MUSEUM IS NOT OBSOLETE) has a bunch of videos on them. I can only imagine how a massive exchange full of them must have sounded. They're so satisfyingly mechanical.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKnS0AB2CTN_eu8k8rgaOW0PWFH2Qv9Ui

I'm biased because I'm building up a small collection, but radios were cooler when they were made of Bakelite.

My modest collection:

Also, I realize that digital tuning is more accurate, but there's something I find very pleasant about turning a knob and the station suddenly comes in clearly. Just that little "aha" serotonin hit.

The internet when it wasn't overtaken by a few major corporations.

I dunno about you, but I have a hankering for the mid-to-late-80s aesthetic, but specifically that taken into sci-fi. I'm talking Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star etc. 80s tech but... Future!

Everything's so chunky and functional. It looks like you could hit it with a sledgehammer and it would still work!

Basically, BUTTONS! Gimme buttons, lots of big buttons! I want things that go click so I can be sure I've pressed them. I don't want a tiddly little touchpanel for my washing machine, I want a button that goes CLACK when I press it!

Clarke's third law is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I have the notion that any technology becomes uninteresting and not cool once reaches the level of magic. We are tactile and inquisitive creatures, so objects that appeal to our hands and perceptions are cool. Once we can no longer grasp the parts, literally or metaphorically, they're no longer alluring.

Phones, cars, screens, computers, anything. Why is Amiga HAM mode fascinating to many people still, even when they're emulating it on a 32-bit-depth screen that can concurrently play high-quality video streamed over the Internet? That's why.

Slide open phones with a QWERTY keyboard. Those were the bomb.

I wish someone would being those back

Tiny lightbulbs fails to express how uncool led tvs are. They’re just diodes. Adulterated silicon. It’s cool in its own way. But yeah. Everything is just silicon

Cars used to be cool. Every car company had some kind of sporty car, a couple cheap cars, a big luxury sedan and, a while ago, a station wagon.

Now every car is an SUV or CUV. Sedans are getting phased out. Cool sports cars don't make money so they don't make them. People don't buy station wagons so they don't make them. And they're pushing big, angry trucks on everyone.

Toasters. Specifically the Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster, with the tag line "Automatic Beyond Belief!". There is a fan site (https://automaticbeyondbelief.org/, excellent url). Like, what other appliance line has a fan site? Surely no modern day toaster!

But of course I first heard about it from Technology Connections video.

Razors. Back in the day you could buy a razor and expect to shave with it every day for the rest of your life. I still have my first razor, a Gillette Slim Adjustable and it still shaves as well as it did the first day I brought it home. The heft and balance are something those new plastic razors and multi bladed monsters can never match.

Thankfully, internet shopping allows me to buy blades from around the world and now I can enjoy my old razor again.

I used to be pretty into machine learning and AI generation circa 2018-ish. It used to be fun and surreal. Sites like artbreeder were a great novelty, and also a pretty good learning tool. Now that it's "good" I feel that not only has a lot of the charm been lost, it's become much easier for malicious actors to use it.

The original tv remote didn't use batteries. It used sound. Giant clunky devices with large tactile buttons. Never runs out of batteries and still works if your kid tries to block the screen to keep you from turning it off

Oh man...I have an entire ten page paper on the go about this topic and it just keeps growing. One day I'll publish it in a blog or something, but for now it's just me vomiting up my thoughts about mass market manufacturing and the loss of zeitgeist.

The examples that I always use are a) Camera Lenses, b) Typewriters, and c) watches.

Mechanical things age individually, developing a sort of Kami, or personality of their own. Camera lenses wear out differently, develop lens bokehs that are unique. Their apertures breath differently as they age No two old mechanical camera lenses are quite the same. Similarly to typewriters; usage creates individual characteristics, so much so that law enforcement can pinpoint a particular typewriter used in a ransom note.

It's something that we've lost in a mass produced world. And to me, that's a loss of unimaginable proportions.

Consider a pocket watch from the civil war, passed down from generation to generation because it was special both in craftsmanship and in connotation. Who the hell is passing their Apple Watch down from generation to generation? No one....because it's just plastic and metal junk in two years. Or buying a table from Ikea versus buying one made bespoke by your neighbour down the street who wood works in his garage. Which of those is worthy of being an heirloom?

If our things are in part what informs the future of our role in the zeitgeist, what do we have except for mounds of plastic scrap.

dial-up modem-router noises when connecting to the Internet

I guess, in a very liberal definition of the term, "cloud gaming". Specifically the old LodgeNet systems in hotels where you could rent Nintendo games by the hour to be streamed to your room from a physical console somewhere behind the front desk. Every room had a special controller with oodles of extra buttons on it hardwired to the television that also functioned as television remotes.

The service was objectively awful, of course, when factoring in how much the hotel charged compared to what little you got for it. But I've always found it fascinating.

Pneumatic tubes were way, way cooler than email.

Of course, you could only use them to send a message to someone in the same office building, so the comparison isn’t perfect… but you know what I mean.

Pop up headlights! Way cooler that way. I've heard a couple reasons given for why they stopped being a thing, but one of them is that they were considered too unsafe for pedestrians-

Which is a fucking crazy though when you consider what we now blindly accept in automotive design with respect to pedestrian safety 😅

Before transistors there were vacuum tubes which did the same thing but using very different principles (and were also way bigger, even than traditional transistors and billions of times more than the transistors in the most modern ICs)

Before electric milling or even steam milling, flour used to be milled using watermills and windmills which, IMHO, are way cooler.

Electromechanical stuff. Like old jukeboxes, pinball machines or anything else that required programming before the widespread use of microcontrollers.

Some people have already mentioned stuff akin to this, like the mechanical govenor, or the post abt THIS MUSEUM IS NOT OBSOLETE, but it really deserves its own thread.

Technology Connections on YouTube has made some great videos about devices like that.

Pinball Jukebox

The internet?

Web 1.0 and even before was way cooler than this corpo bullshit web we have now.

The internet

Ice. As time has gone by, it has become less cool.

I MISS CLEAR COMPUTERS >:(

I mean LOOK AT IT it's so much cooler than just a box!
The SteamDeck community has been cooking with some clear cases which I would buy if I didn't have to risk breaking my beloved $500 indie machine.

I like the look of vacuum-fluorescent displays (VFDs) -- a high-contrast display with a black background, solid color areas. Enough brightness to cause some haloing spilling over into the blackness if you were looking at it. Led to a particular design style adapted to the technology, was very "high-tech" in maybe the 1980s.

OLEDs have high contrast, and I suppose you could probably replicate the look, but I doubt that the style will come back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluorescent_display

EDIT: A few more car dashboards using similar style:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/skillshare/uploads/session/tmp/50c99738

https://www.pinterest.com/hudsandguis/retro-car-dashboards/

And some concept cars with similar dash:

https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2022/retro-digital-dashboards

Some other devices using VFDs:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/PkPSDOjhxwM/maxresdefault.jpg

https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1_TIdcGmWBuNkHFJHq6yatVXaZ/LINK1-VFD-Music-Audio-Spectrum-Indicator-Audio-VU-Meter-Amplifier-Board-Level-Precision-Clock-Adjustable-AGC.jpg

The Subaru Outback.

In the near to mid future, I think an answer to this question are Internal Combustion Engines. I love electric vehicles and look forward to the tech improving. But the sheer coolness factor of moving a large machine through perfectly timed and calibrated explosions is tough to beat.

The phones with the internal hidden camera, I was sure it would be the future

https://www.91mobiles.com/list-of-phones/pop-up-camera-phones

Web browsers about 10 years ago

Disney lost their old camera tech used to make a "yellow screen" with sodium vapor lights.

It's actually better than a green screen because the yellow light is so specific that even if you remove that particular frequency of light, everything else still looks fine. You can do all sorts of things that would normally be very difficult to pull off with any of our green screen tech (like drinking water in a clear bottle or wearing a rainbow dress).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk

Steam locomotives. The crazy streamlining, the size of some of those motherfuckers. 6 foot tall wheels, 100 tons moving at 125mph and all that shit accomplished 80+ years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Class_A4_4468_Mallard